George woke up in a panic. His heart was beating hard, dread smothering his entire body. His wife was gone, so were the girls, the sun whitewashed everything outside. George looked at the digital clock, he had truly slept in today, the subtle whines of Jack not enough to wake him; it was already noon. At some point the attention-starved dog had given up trying to get George’s attention and gone back downstairs to his bed. That’s where George found him after showering and changing into normal clothes. He had felt energized by yesterday’s walk and decided he would do the same today. The weather was a carbon copy of yesterday’s, inviting George to spend all day outside, but he and Jack continued on their walk briskly. The Saint Bernard and old woman were nowhere to be found today, but the hacking dog was right where they left him, almost exactly so. Without Beethoven’s warning, George and Jack caught the hacking dog unawares; despite being surprised, the salt and pepper dog resumed its same monotone grunting, at the same volume and rhythm, with the same accompanying hop as yesterday, as if an invisible hand had flipped a switch and set its gears in motion.
When they arrived back at the house George immediately set about the task at hand, avoiding yesterday’s pitfalls of coffee and video games. He opened his laptop, navigated to the websites for the various universities of the area, opening each in a different tab, and began searching the employment opportunity pages. Out of four different schools only one had any information technology positions listed, and it required way more expertise than George had. This was George’s biggest lead, what he felt would be the most workable option; the misfire left him searching for where to go next. As a whim he decided to check out the job postings for the surrounding cities; interested to see what his position would have net him, but the results were the same as the universities: nothing relevant.
George began searching generic technology terms matched with “jobs” to see if he could force inspiration. After fifteen minutes of the arbitrary exercise he began to notice a pattern: one website kept showing up every time, no matter what he searched. He followed the link, recognizing it as a paid advertisement as he did so. It was a website to help you build your own blog, or photo gallery, or e-commerce shop; “whatever you need.” George had always wanted to be a writer, or more appropriately to write, calling himself a writer always felt pretentious, especially having not written anything of substance, but with most other things in his life the passion had taken a back seat when his first and second daughters were born. Now, with no job, George had ample time to dive in. It wasn’t a solvent idea for work, but it could keep him creative, or motivated, and it could be used in a resume depending on what he was applying for.
In no time at all George had convinced himself that this was the way to go, and he had already conceived of a format and preliminary content by the time he’d entered his bank account information. He released the not-insignificant funds for service, his own website with custom domain name and email, without thinking about the ramifications on his savings.
The first step for George was presentation, specifically a name. George wanted a title that was meaningful on different levels, intriguing, but also vague enough to be meaningless or take on any definition the reader inferred. Song titles, lyrics, movie quotes, idioms, famous speeches, all passed through George’s mind but none met his requirements. He got up and walked over to his bookshelf, searching for inspiration. He decided he would find it in the most weathered and creased book on his shelf, the book that reignited his interest in reading, and spawned his desire to write: Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. His immediate thought was to turn to Fanshawe’s passages in The Locked Room; the passages, of a friend who had lost his mind and locked himself in a room threatening suicide, were unsettling despite being read out of context, but did not inspire a name. He flipped back to City of Glass remembering the red notebook Quinn uses as an improvisational detective and the greater notebook theme that runs throughout most of Auster’s books; but The Red Notebook, or any variation of, seemed too generic and too obvious a nod to Auster.
After spending some more time with City of Glass, and ultimately striking out, George turned to the middle story, Ghosts, and was immediately taken by the first sentence: First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown. It was decided: this would be the inspiration for the title of George’s blog, he just had to rejigger it a bit, and justify the meaning and misappropriation of something he loved so much for something as trivial as a blog that he had no idea what to do with, and then he’d have a title.